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 divan, peering down at the knife scar on her arm from time to time, studying it, as though it were an inscription.

Blake was still watching the woman when the door behind him was slowly opened; a head was thrust in, and as quietly withdrawn again. Blake dropped his right hand to his coat pocket and moved further along the wall, facing the woman. There was nothing of which he stood afraid: he merely wished to be on the safe side.

"Well, what word 'll I take back to Ottenheim?" he demanded.

The woman grew serious. Then she showed her rice-like row of teeth as she laughed.

"That means there 's nothing in it for me," she complained with pouting-lipped moroseness. Her venality, he began to see, was merely the instinctive acquisitiveness of the savage, the greed of the petted child.

"No more than there is for me," Blake acknowledged. She turned and caught up a heavily flowered mandarin coat of plaited